


Fellow Travelers

by SilverDagger



Category: Claymore
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 05:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3163694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deneve doesn't know how it happened, but she can't manage to chase Helen away, she can't make herself want to, and maybe she's not the only one who needs a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fellow Travelers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkstone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkstone/gifts).



Deneve is just settling in for the night when Helen finds her, leaning back against her sword and looking up into the darkening sky, and she isn't expecting or hoping for any company.

It isn't unusual for one warrior to encounter another on the road, and when she sees Helen heading toward her, she's expecting her to pass right on by with a word or two of greeting if she's feeling friendly, a nod of acknowledgement if she's not. But as soon as Helen comes in range of Deneve's aura, she lifts her head like a dog catching scent of its quarry and sprints the remaining distance to the campsite, only to settle in like there's no question she belongs there. She sits looking up at Deneve with her sharp chin propped in her hands, and doesn't seem to be showing any signs of going away.

"We're going to need a fire," she says.

"There is no we," Deneve says.

"What's that?"

"There is no we. There's me, and there's the irritating rookie that I can't get to stop following me around."

Helen seems to consider that, and her, and then spends the next moment studying the dirt beneath her nails with a critical eye, like it's the most interesting thing in the immediate vicinity. There's something spidery about her, Deneve thinks - her long limbs and narrow shoulders, the abrupt and not quite natural fluidity with which she moves. It isn't disturbing, exactly, not wrong, just - odd. Distracting.

"You could, you know," Helen says.

"Excuse me?"

"You're stronger than I am. You could chase me off if you wanted to."

She isn't wrong. She probably knows it.

"Can't be bothered," Deneve says with a shrug.

"That's what I thought," Helen says, and flashes her a quicksilver grin. "I mean, since you're too lazy to get firewood and all."

"You're the one who feels compelled to burn things," Deneve says. "You can find the fuel yourself."

Helen nods like it's no more than she'd expected, and clambers to her feet, saying, "fair's fair, I suppose."

Then she's gone in a burst of speed, and when she returns, it's with an armful of dry wood obtained from who-knows-where. She kindles a merry blaze, and by the time she's done, Deneve has to admit that it's nice to have a bit of heat and light, a circle drawn between them and the night outside. For a time, Helen seems content to sit there holding her hands up to the flames, occasionally feeding twigs to the fire, and for a time, Deneve is content with silence as well. Then, inevitably, Helen starts asking questions.

At first, it's nothing much, just foolishness: favorite food, favorite color, favorite fireside tale. She learns in turn that Helen likes green, and fresh fruit, and some convoluted story from the south about a princess with a cursed brother and an increasingly odd series of tasks to complete, and she thinks for a while that it will be nothing more than that - nothing personal, nothing dangerous - until Helen blindsides her with the kind of question no warrior ever asks another.

"Oy, Deneve?"

"Yeah?"

"You ever thought about just running away?"

"Deserting? They'd kill us."

"Sure. But you ever thought about it?"

"Once in a while, I guess," Deneve says. "Thought about a lot of things I never plan to do."

"Yeah?" Helen half turns toward her, and Deneve thinks for a moment that she's going to ask what, but all she says is, "what would you do, if you ever did?"

"Hmm?"

"I mean," Helen says, "I mean if you had anywhere in the entire world to go, if you could do whatever the hell you wanted, what would you do?"

It's a meaningless question. There's no answer, because there's no point in thinking about things that won't ever happen. But it's also a meaningless question because when she thinks about it, really thinks, she can't actually imagine being happier. So she falls back, looking up into nothingness interspersed with points of light, and says, "this."

Helen snorts, ungraceful. "Seriously? You'd take an empty field out in the ass-end of nowhere and the questionable pleasure of my company over piles of gold, fine wine, and a lifetime of adventure?"

"I'm a realist," she says, and then, "yeah. I would."

"That's 'cause you're an idiot," Helen says, with inexplicable fondness. "But hey, you're not alone in that, at least."

She reaches down to pick a handful of small yellow wildflowers, tosses them into the fire one by one, watches them curl and smoke. She doesn't seem easy with stillness, or silence. She's probably uneasy with solitude, which explains why she's willing to go out of her way to seek out Deneve's company. No doubt, if her territory had been adjacent to any other warrior's, she'd have followed them home instead.

But when Deneve falls asleep, Helen is still there. When she wakes the next morning, Helen hasn't left. When she sets off to report back to headquarters, Helen just happens to be going in the same direction.

They pass through settled country on the way, human territory a sharp contrast to the wilderness she's gotten used to. It's a prosperous province. Rows of wheat fields and orchards line the road, green and golden and heavy with late-summer bounty, sometimes a small village in the distance. Farmers' children watch from fields and fences, wary, only to go darting off like skittish animals before they get close. Helen smiles at them sometimes, and waves, and once one of them waves back and follows along behind them for the next half a mile, until an older girl runs up and pulls him away in a furious panic, hissing imprecations as she drags him back to what she must assume is safety.

 _Older sister, maybe,_ Deneve thinks, and scowls in her direction. _Stupid girl ought to spend more time looking out for herself._

Helen disappears shortly after that, just angles off the path into the shade of an orchard and doesn't return. Deneve doesn't make any move to stop her. Whatever Helen's up to, it's her own business, and Deneve is long overdue some peace and quiet. But after a while, the quiet is more distracting than the chatter had been, and it's harder to fall into the easy rhythm of a soldier's pace without someone else's footsteps keeping time beside her. She keeps glancing off to the side, looking for company that isn't there, listening for some aimless comment that doesn't come.

There's no hurry, she's got nowhere she needs to be, but when she catches herself wondering what Helen would have to say about a garishly bedecked scarecrow with an unnerving pumpkin-head grin, she shifts into a run, first human-speed and then faster, head down and leaning into the wind. The countryside blurs past, fields and farmhouses falling behind too fast to catch more than a glimpse of, not fast enough to shake the suspicion that she isn't running toward, but away.

It's not a pace she can keep up forever, and soon enough she slows to a jog, and then a walk, until the sun is low and she stops to rest again, alone, in a copse of trees far enough away from any sign of human life for her to feel comfortable again.

She doesn't make a fire. She doesn't need to.

But she does find her eyes straying to the road behind her whenever she doesn't think about not looking, and her senses stretching out in search of a trace of familiar youki, half-certain that Helen is just a few steps away, half-convinced she's finally decided to give up and leave well enough alone. It's almost possible to believe that's exactly what she's hoping for, until she sees Helen walking up the road, eyes gleaming in the dimness, shadow long and black with the light behind her, and she feels herself relax and breathe out in sudden relief.

"Still alive, then," she says by way of greeting, and Helen calls back, "sorry to disappoint," but there's no rancor there. She tosses something unexpectedly in Deneve's direction, and Deneve catches it without thinking, feels her fingers close around something cool and smooth and round. An apple, glossy green and only a little bruised. Helen's got a whole pack of them slung across her back, carried in a makeshift bundle tied from her cloak, and she swings it down with a triumphant grin.

"You stole those," Deneve says. She isn't certain whether she cares enough to disapprove or not.

"They've got bushels full of the damn things," Helen says. "Won't even notice they're gone." She leans back, stretches, seeming careless and effortlessly at ease. "Anyways, we keep 'em safe from the yoma, so they really shouldn't complain."

Deneve doesn't argue or talk about the Organization's price, just turns the apple over in her hands, not entirely sure what to do with it. Despite her exertion, she isn't feeling all that hungry, but food is food and it seems a shameful thing to waste it. After all, she needs to keep herself in good condition. And she can hear her sister's ghost chiding in the back of her mind, _that's not how you accept a gift_ \- and she wouldn't care, because she doesn't need to let the dead run her life no matter how much she owes them, but she owes Helen too, and it won't kill her to offer some slight courtesy in return.

"Thanks," she says, and takes a bite, feels juice run down her chin. It's better than anything she's tasted in a long time, maybe since childhood - crisp and sweet and well worth the petty thievery, though she's not about to admit it.

"Hey, Deneve," Helen says, and this time she sounds almost hesitant, something else lurking behind the surface of her good cheer.

"Mmmh?" Deneve says, around a mouthful of apple.

"What do you think you'd have been, if you hadn't been one of us?"

"I don't know."

"Well, haven't you ever thought about it?"

 _You could tell her to shut up,_ Deneve thinks, and then, _yeah, and you think she'd listen?_

Maybe. Maybe she would. Maybe that's why Deneve hasn't said it yet.

"I don't know," she says again. "I don't think it matters much."

"I'd have been a sailor," Helen says, "or a highwayman. Something like that, anyway."

"You probably would," Deneve says. "A river pirate. Best of both. You would have been a good one."

"Damn right, I would have."

Helen doesn't say anything after that, though, just stares down at the apple in her hand and then back in the direction of the farmlands they've left behind. Pensive, or troubled. With Helen, the two seem to go hand in hand, at least as long as she doesn't have a drink or a fight to drown her worries, and Deneve wishes she were as adept at her companion at dragging people out of their own thoughts. All she knows how to do is needle them into anger or watch and wait for them to speak, and she doesn't want a fight now, not with Helen, so she opts for silence until at last she lies back, closes her eyes and tries to sleep.

Rest never comes easy to her, but it seems especially elusive now, with the persistent feeling that there's something she ought to be saying, if only she can remember how. She ignores it - she's gotten good at that, over the years - and she's almost asleep when she's jarred awake again by someone poking insistently at her arm. She hisses in irritation and knocks Helen's hand away, thinking that anyone else trying a thing like that is likely to lose a limb - and that gives her pause, because when she thinks about it, she isn't really sure when it stopped being _anyone_ and started being _anyone else._

"Oy, Deneve?"

"Yeah?"

"It's probably not true. I don't think I'd have been much of anything." She shifts in place and props herself up on one elbow, looking more serious than Deneve has seen her before. "When I think about it like that, this ain't so bad."

Deneve nods slowly, thinking it over. "We can be useful, at least."

"Not what I mean," Helen says. "I mean, it's no kind of life, just wandering from town to town like some kind of outcast, or, or a monster or something. But it can be, if you let it."

"Sure," Deneve says, keeping her voice neutral. She doesn't know if she believes it, but she's certain her doubts aren't what Helen needs to hear now.

"Hey," she says instead, "where do you think you'll be going after this?"

"Back to my own lands, probably. Over westward. Why?"

"Because I might be going in the same direction."

Helen's smile in return is irrepressible, like sun through clouds, and Deneve doesn't know what she's done to earn this luck, only that she's willing to live with it until it goes away. On impulse, she reaches out to touch Helen's arm and says, "you wouldn't have been nothing. No one is. Now get some sleep, we'll worry about everything else tomorrow."

And Helen laughs and says, "you know, you're not half as much of a hardass as you like to pretend," and Deneve can't even deny it, so she just lets herself sink into the fragile sort of peace that comes with night breeze and the chirp of crickets and Helen's aura burning bright on the edge of her awareness. This time, sleep comes quickly, and if she dreams, they're not bad dreams, and they don't wake her until she opens her eyes to sunlight and the sound of Helen humming some jaunty tune as she practices her swordwork.

 _Still there, then,_ she thinks, _still going in the same direction,_ and she smiles, because it's going to be a long time before either of them manages to shake off the other, and it's not nearly as much of a problem as she once would have imagined. Comrades, then, she supposes. Friends. She can manage that.

That morning finds them both walking slow through fields and past towns full of strangers, in no hurry to get where they're going. That night, and the next nights after, they build a fire, and take turns with the firewood, and Helen grouses about chores while Deneve rolls her eyes, and neither of them mean anything by it but _glad to have you here._ It's a long road, and it doesn't lead home or anywhere like it, but that can't be changed and Deneve isn't going to let it bother her - not now that she's got someone to walk beside her.


End file.
